I am very newbie with smalltalk, but I have some thoughts about this question.<br><br>- Markting (someone has already say it)<br>-<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> Lack of investment</font> (someone has already say it)<br>
- Smalltalk is simple. And, as It says a friend of mine, simplest things doesn't sell. It might be complex. Complex things are the most sold.<br>- Companies needs to spend many and spent their budgets<br>- Databases support. Squeak for example, how can be used in many enterprise projects if there is only driver for mysql and postgres ? and Glorp only with postgres... We did a survey and they are just the 20% of the market (we need support for oracle, mssql, and so on.). Because of this, we are working in SqueakDBX.<br>
- IDE. It has a lot of good things, but also a lot of limitations. I am very use to use Eclipse. And sometime to miss some features about it.<br>- There is no company (in squeak) behind it. Managers, owners, directors, and so on, many times need this. They need it in order to have someone to blame in case of problems. <br>
<br>cheers,<br><br>Mariano<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:casimiro.barreto@gmail.com">casimiro.barreto@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
Alan Grimes escreveu:
<div class="Ih2E3d"><blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>For me the biggest issue has been trying to run my code from outside
Squeak. This includes running Squeak headless to do something
script-like and configuring a GUI application to run in a way that
doesn't require the user to know they are running Squeak. Both of these
are supposedly possible, but very difficult to get right.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre>1. The VM, it's weak, no multithreading, few IO options.
2. The restriction to image based smalltalk instead of the ability to
run discreet programs...
Image based smalltalk is awesome but it makes it difficult to interface
smalltalk code with external systems.
</pre>
</blockquote>
</div><div align="justify">Th<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">e
shortcomings about the squeak VM can be easily surpassed. Same thing
about the "image" issue.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">IMHO what holds Smalltalk
(and squeak in particular) is lack of investment ($$$) in order to
provide the things that "commercial users" (aka "regular
developers/users") imagine/request as desirable (like "canonic"
documentation, "canonic" books like "Smalltalk for dummies" (LOL) or
"coreSmalltalk" or "Smalltalk Foundation Classes", better default
options for the interfaces).</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Besides these "small things"
there are some important issues: there are several flavors of smalltalk
and they're not compatible to each other. It seems that in the
"open/free world" squeak will take the lead and perhaps it is good
news. Anyways, today we have only VW to be seriously considered in the
"commercial world" (since Dolphin is not multi-platform and was "half
abandoned" by its developers and other smalltalks are both non portable
and little known) and squeak and VW VMs are not compatible (no instant
or even easy port from squeak to VW).</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">It is not possible to imagine
the success of anything that is not accepted by the non-academic
community. Currently most of the non-academic community in the World
has little more than high-school degree, little or no fluency in
English and earn something like US$1.000,00/month (or less) for a
journey of at least 40hours/week (and lots of non payed over-time). So
I do think that the two previous paragraphs are relevant aspects to the
question o</font>f<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> "what is
holding back smalltalk?"</font><br>
</div>
<br>
</div>
<br><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br>